Dissolving the I in the We. Annual St Thomas More Lecture

Dissolving the I in the We: Love and the Problem of Community The following is Dr. Tutt’s St. Thomas More Lecture delivered on March 18, 2018 at St. John Fisher University.  Read part one at The New Polis, here and part two, here. Part I Posing the Problem: The Dialectic of Communitas and Immunitas I want to talk tonight about the philosophy of community. We have to first define what we mean by community. I’d like to begin with an understanding of community based in the Latin derivation of community and isolate two elements of the word which form a pair – the munus, which is defined curiously as “gift” and co, which is a prefix that refers to “together.” Community thus ties together the gift of togetherness, or the gift of being-together. But what is the gift of the munus? It is a gift of wealth, or perhaps of duty? Philosophers have different theories of the gift that we must explore. The very concept of gift implies that community is founded on a sense of obligation or debt that requires some sacrifice. We know this intuitively from the popular maxim that ‘one cannot give without some risk of loss.’ But what is the loss that one risks in entering community? I will argue tonight that community is not what invents the self; it is what exposes the self to a form of self-loss, to dissolution of its former state. Community exposes the self to a form of loss that is constitutive of the social as such. In order for the social to have a sphere of enlightened exchange, community is a necessary function of any society as it opens a space for a mode of exchange that suspends identity and particular commitments of the participants. Entering or forming community withdraws us from ourselves, from our particular identities. But why enter community, or why does community entail this obligation and form of exchange? The call to enter into this space of self-loss, to exchange the gift of an obligation or debt that cannot be repaid, is not something unique to our own hyper modern society. As the anthropologist Victor Turner discusses in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure – community is an expression and activity found in every culture. But not everything in a culture is community. Community is an exception to the norm. Turner argues that in every culture there emerges a form of community, what he names “communitas” that is brought about by members of the culture as a liminal or transitional experience. Communitas, for Turner, fulfills an urge in the society that is affective and desire-based experience present in every culture he analyzes. This urge to enter into communitas conflicts with what Turner calls ‘structure.’ Structure, in Turner’s account, is another word for hierarchy, order, or authority, and it manifests in different cognitive forms of organizing human society. Anti-structure is thus communitas; a liminal and existential revolt against structure that seeks catharsis and release for a different form of freedom from the different forms of constrictions placed on living in groups. Communitas is understood by Turner as a regenerative process to rid the self of the rigidity on life imposed by structure. In this sense, the dialectic between communitas and structure is similar to the dialectic between Apollonian, or conceptual, reason-based forms of communal order and Dionysian forms that emphasize liminality, freedom and expression. Turner’s account of structure and anti-structure is similar to Freud’s notion of the death drive and life drive – eros and thantaos – or two libidinal forces that are mediated by what Freud calls the reality principle, a normalizing force. We will return to psychoanalysis and its unique and important contribution to thinking community later. In the history of western philosophy, we find a similar pairing, or dialectic, of community. I want to take a little time to track this dialectic of communitas in western philosophy up to our present. Although Turner identifies communitas as an experiential revolt, a Dionysian upsurge, however, I’m not convinced that communitas is necessarily or always an experiential phenomena. Although we can trace a rich dialogue on theories of community back to Plato and Aristotle, I’d like to chart a trajectory beginning with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan where Hobbes introduces a model of social contract determined by the sovereign king and which pushes this more liberatory version of community to the periphery. For Hobbes, the state becomes a form of structure (as Turner uses the term), which every community must introject, thus taming the power of the gift-giving form of community. Communitas is thus met with a negative double that immunizes its potency. For Hobbes, community is a threat to the stability of the wider social contract that composes the state’s order. Hobbes re-defines Aristotle’s idea that man is a social being by placing man’s relation to the community as formed around the affect of fear. Fear contains a potentiality—in the Aristotelian sense—as it is able to establish a communal covenant that protects the people. Fear serves as the affective glue of the social bond, a bond that paradoxically eradicates fear itself. For Hobbes, it is not that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”, rather, it is that we have fear to fear in order to remain within the commonwealth, so by embracing this fear, we eliminate or immunize fear in relation to the social sphere of life. This Hobbesian tautology of fear privileges the state over the community and makes individual hostility the constitutive social bond. Hobbes is the first antagonist of communitas, replacing the state with community; whereas Rousseau is the first real philosopher of communitas in the western tradition. For Rousseau it was the will of the people that escapes or eludes the power of the state. Rousseau develops a theory of community that is grounded in sense and existence. Rousseau’s ‘general will’ is the most important concept he develops in the Social Contract and his idea is that community should no longer be identified with transcendent figures such as the nation, God, or the leader; but rather the subjects of the community possess an interior freedom, a space by which their wills can gain autonomy from the state. Man cannot be thought as an isolated thinking being in separation from others in the community because egotistical exchanges between subjects always result in the closure of community, thus in order to realize community for Rousseau, subjects must lose their egos in others in order to get out of what he calls the state of nature. Getting outside of one’s ego is one way of escaping Hobbes’ war of all against all. The idea of self-loss in Rousseau’s concept of community is clear in his statement, “I never meditate, I never dream better than when I forget myself.” But is Rousseau’s idea of community ultimately sufficient to achieving communitas? From Kant to Hegel’s Idea of Community as the Space of Freedom Immanuel Kant moves the formation of community from the will of the people, or any conception of the essence of the community found in the identity of a national, religious, or religious sense, to a different concept of community formed around the categorical imperative and what he names the Moral Law. Kant’s categorical imperative both individualizes the Law, and makes the formation of community contingent on an internalized sense of duty. The transition from Rousseau’s ‘general will’ to Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ is an important transition in the history of philosophy as Kant’s categorical imperative is an interiorization of Rousseau’s general will. For Kant, the origin of community (according to Roberto Esposito) cannot be defined except by the otherness that separates it from itself. Rousseau’s state of nature is what deludes efforts in willing the moral law and must be opposed by identifying an internal principle to reasoning itself.(17) For Kant, we can say the munus or gift of community is a lack produced by the state of nature. Humans do not fully understand the Moral Law, but they nonetheless submit to it based on an internalized process of command and obedience to it.(74)  The Kantian subject must correspond his singular will to a universal set of wills in what Kant calls the “Kingdom of Ends.” Liberal philosophy will adopt Kant’s ideas and after the French revolution, the reason-based potential of the enlightened public sphere is capable of forming and advancing community (160). The Kantian idea of community is significant in that it recognizes that the gradual enlightenment and perfection of the moral law amongst cosmopolitan citizens holds the power to create institutions that conform to this moral law. But Kant did not go far enough in this regard, at least according to Hegel. Hegel developed an ethical theory of community in The System of Ethical Life and the Philosophy of Right where community is understood as the creation of a space where social relations achieve a form of interaction based in freedom, realized actually in the world. Where Kant kept community to a regulative idea that can only be known through an interior Moral Law, Hegel argues that this idea has to be understood as an actual realization in the world. Hegel’s idea of community is one that stipulates one cannot be free alone as an individual, but only as a participant in actually realized and just social institutions. A debate remains within Hegel commentators whether Hegel meant that the ethical life can only be free in the state or whether the ethical life – i.e. the munus can also be realized beyond the state (96-7). What Hegel does claim is that community as ethical life can only be realized once the original state of unfreedom, or the state of nature, which for Hegel is the master and slave relation—is abolished. The subject of ethical life, Hegel writes, must able to “intuit himself as himself in every other individual” – only then can subjects “reach supreme subject-objectivity.”(133) Yet Hegel takes this identity of the all and consciousness within the sphere of ethical life not simply as Kant would, as abstract reason, but he places it as a different form of equality of citizenship that displays itself in empirical consciousness, in the consciousness of particular social relations. Capitalism and Community – Marx Where Hegel locates community as an actualized or realized idea in the world, Marx would argue, especially in his later work the Grundrisse, that community is an impossible demand in a capitalist society. In the Grundrisse and the Urtext, as well as different parts of Capital, the question of community, or what Marx calls the Gemeinwesen, is presented as the core of man’s social existence or “common being.” Community is thus a deeply philosophical category in Marxist thought. Capitalism can only develop on condition that it frees man and makes him into a commodity, but to do so, it has to destroy the various communities that encompassed him, which were governed, in a more or less debased way, by an economy in which man was the aim of production. What capitalism thus offers is a replacement community, what Marx calls the ‘material community’, which is required to overcome the human fragmentation that comes with the reduction of individuals to a set of exchanges. Capital thus presents an alternative community to the pre-capitalist ‘natural community’. In general, Marx’s argument goes like this: capital constantly expands to produce more value, and in this expansion, capital destroys social links and bonds amongst people. Almost paradoxically, this destructive drive of capitalism makes the desire for experiencing community within a capitalist society even more pronounced. But it is not only alienation and atomization that makes the call of community abound within a capitalist society. Marx’s thesis of community can be summed up in one statement: capital erodes social bonds [or the more well-known statement that “all that is solid melts into air!”]. The value-form is jettisoned by a pulsion or drive that constantly pushes capital into circulation and accumulation cycles. Thus, the product of capitalist production is not value per se, but surplus-value: a product that is produced by the extraction of socially necessary labor time and then put into the cycle of capitalist valuation (the market, investment, etc.). The problem community faces within capitalism revolves around two issues: the reduction of each member to a commodified relation to the production of the surplus object, a process that leads to atomization and alienation and thus the demand for community. Then secondly, capitalism produces zones or sites of surplus that fail to sustain the munus of the common because they are subject to the capitalist valuation process—they enter and reenter circulation—these sites are temporary, and always in flux. Can the surplus object produced by capitalism be shared in-common? Can the surplus object that creates a site of community, let’s say the private sphere, function as the site for gift exchange? Marx would say no because the surplus object that forms community is the result of exploitative labor, i.e. the labor time of the worker and more fundamentally, the munus is not a shared, common site of potential unity of the community. The individual has not produced as a member of a “natural community”, and yet through exchange and the division of labour, his product becomes social. He owes the possibility of appropriating a product not to participation in a community, but rather to the fact that he himself has produced one too. This is the beginning of the material community created by means of production, or, more exactly, by means of its products. A community like this can no longer result from the uniting or reuniting of men, but from that of things, while at the same time it must also stabilize bonds between them. Man’s only hope for a return to the natural community comes in the form of class struggle, proleterianization or revolution. Once capital reaches a stage of what Marx calls real subsumption.  Real subsumption is a phenomenon where capital has entered a position of total domination over all social relations beyond merely the sphere of labor. Capital, and not exchange-value or money becomes the dominating social relation that dictates the arrangement of the community of man. The disappearance of the natural community means that capital has successfully immunized and closed down the possibility available to form sustainable communities outside of the operation of the process of capital valuation. Here we can see the evolution of Burning Man as one example of the take over of capitalist valuation in its attempt to form a community and form of exchange based on reciprocity and the gift. The name given to this seemingly final and total foreclosure of community under fixed capital and circulating capital is “capitalist realism,” a concept coined by the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher that refers to the collapse of social imagination outside of capitalism. This form of collapse began with the policies of neoliberalism that began in the last 1970s. One of the chief architects of neoliberalism, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher summed the philosophy up nicely when she stated: “…they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society..” For Thatcher, society must be replaced by relations of individuals held together by self-interest, each taking responsibility for their own sphere of property, profit, and value. Thatcher’s sentiment is ironic from a Marxist perspective because she is embracing the very alienating tendency of capital itself. Instead of seeking the means to counteract this alienating and fragmentary operation of capital on social relations, Thatcher calls for capital to serve a role that it cannot fulfill, i.e. Thatcher calls for the eradication of community. This notion of an eradication of community under late capitalism or neoliberalism has an important consequence that I want to turn to now. Forming Community – The Fused Group The famous French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argues in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason that under capitalism community is passive, forming in a space he names intermundane. Because there is no common object that community holds in common—there is no gift or munus of community, this creates a condition of social life that Sartre refers to as seriality of social being, or a passive form of social being. In many ways, this is Sartre’s theory of immunitas. In a capitalist society, Sartre argues that community forms based on a recurrence of inert objects that are produced by different groups (self-help groups, community associations, religious congregations, etc.) – each object [of community] presents what Sartre calls a totalization that is never achieved – i.e. community cannot escape the horizon of its own atomized social existence.” Capital is, according to Sartre,  “[a] concrete materiality that supports and manifests a flight that eats [the community] away.”(78) The individual forms bonds of interiority with the social world around them but these bonds are completely passive, leaving social being in a position of alienation or what he calls ‘inert being’. Man exists in this inert social being and can only regain his humanity through acts of negation or revolt against it. The social facts of man’s existence (poverty, exploitation) are forces of material significance that objectify and alienate man but they are also what make man. Man only realizes himself by way of a complete transcendence of his material conditions, realized collectively in revolt. To quote Sartre: One has the feeling that man only exists in flashes, in a savage discontinuity that is, ultimately, always absorbed into inertia and the law of separation. Collective action is the pure moment of revolt. Everything else is an expression of man’s inevitable inhumanity, which is passivity (136) There is thus an alternative to this more static serial formation of the community and that comes in what Sartre refers to as the ‘fused group’. Through acts of negation and revolt, the fused group develops a new interior, or ‘untranscedable’ position. The fused group is another name for a group in revolt, for which the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks or other revolutionary communities might apply. The revolt of the fused group manages to dissolve the inert being of each member and each member of the fused group inhabits the role of what Sartre calls the ‘third party’; i.e. they manage to escape the institutional inertia and transcend ordinary social being. While man finds meaning from these moments of transcendence (or revolt) from the social world — the fused group does not last and the bond it forms falls back into conflict. The fused group’s fraternity is thus only a temporary bond based on an oath or new social contrast each member makes with one another so as to avoid violence. But Sartre fails to theorize the fidelity needed for a community to sustain the long-term cohesion of the fused group. Sartre’s theory of community leaves us with the question of what communal fraternity requires for its long-term existence? Marx argues the munus is not attainable within capitalism and Sartre discovers the fused group cannot make it last. Identity and Power Now that we have some conceptual resources to better understand the dialectic of Immunitas and communitas, I want to make some reflections on community in our present world. Where do we find communitas in our age? Or, put differently, what are the challenges to community today? I want to focus on two key problems: that of collective or political identity and love. Today, social and political identity is a problem to community formation in a way similar to how biological identities and Social Darwinist theories of identity plagued late nineteenth century and early 20th century European and Anglo-American intellectuals. The way that we think of identity today leads to forms of violence in that it prevents communities from forming adequate bonds of solidarity across different identity groups, whether they be religious, political or class-based. We know this form of conflict by the name of identity politics. Part of the problem of identity politics is the way it conceives of power and oppression. Identity politics poses a problem to community in that it refuses the work of self-cancellation or self-dissolution that is so fundamental to forming community. One cannot enter into the obligation of community with a sense of one’s own identity as not lacking; entering into community destabilizes one’s social identity. The challenge of community in this history of philosophy is that to enter community one sacrifices their prior subjective identity to enter into an exchange of an emptiness that is constitutive of the social relation itself. Identity politics, at its worst, hardens this space of the gift or munus and it forecloses the possibility of fused groups to form. Identity politics has now reached a point where it is seen as a source of liberation unto itself. Notice for example that calls for exclusive community formation, especially in the form of the alt-Right, are not only using identity politics for white people, they are attracting people on the basis of a non-solidarity form of community, one that closes off the space of the self-cancellation that is necessary for forming community. Identity based forms of community tend to form the desire for community over a broader liberation-based form of desire for community. Our age is one that risks falling into what the philosopher Judith Butler names “post-liberatory” — that is, we increasingly think that our actions are destined to be domesticated or immunized in advance of even making them. As a consequence, forms of resistance to power are no longer concerned with gestures that seek to re-invent the self in a new relation to community. In an American context, the project of a more universal formation of community has an index point in Black Power movements as well as black universal collectives throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. This liberatory spirit was also found in American organizations such as Rising Up Angry, a radical youth organization based in Chicago that brought together poor black youth, Hillbillies, Greasers and assortments of Latino immigrants. The mission of Rising Up Angry was explicitly set on the building a new man, a new woman, and a new world,” with the masthead motto “To love we must fight.” Community subtracts itself from the world as it is by forming a new space for thought and action. This new space of the munus is an outside space where new truths, myths and aesthetics are invented. This space is akin to a counterpublic, or a space of artistic and cultural production that is formed in conflict and distinction with the norms and contexts of the more dominant cultural environment. Counterpublics understand their own revolutionary potential to be directed towards a future public, one whose language will be enacted in the idiom of its present obscurity in a future time. Part II: Forming Community: The Strategy of Nonidentification But we have to provide an account of the way in which identity forms in groups before we can understand the potential for communitas. To do this, I want to look at psychoanalysis to provide an account of identity as well as the theme of love and community. For our purposes tonight, we will focus on the insight that Freud makes about the constitution of the ego; he claims the ego is always already a social phenomenon. In his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud seeks to “work back to what social relations presuppose,” and he argues that no social relation can come about without understanding who holds the key to the “before” and who holds the key to the “after.” Freud defines the communal/social bond as follows: “a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (116). Freud thus argues that every communal bond must be preceded by the cultivation of a self-love prior to the social love that is formed in the identification with an object love of the community, which most often takes the form of the leader. There are two forms of identification that binds the group together and forms the social bond: love for the leader and identification with an ego ideal (155-6). Freud describes the phenomenon of identification as a process by which a subject assimilates an aspect or a trait of another subject. In the process, the subject becomes transformed in the likeness of the other. The subject also becomes differentiated from the other they identify with by the partial nature of every mode of identification. Freud would argue that every community is formed around the symbolic identification of love of the leader figure. It is love for the leader that creates the identificatory glue that promotes a peaceful communal bond. This jealous contract, this egalitarianism rooted in envy (as Freud points out in Group Psychology), gives rise to fraternity, the sense of justice, social conscience, and the sense of duty – in short “Civilization and its Discontents” says, to law in general: “Instead of pulling out one another’s hair, they acted as a united group… originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object (120).” So there are two forms of identification in Freud’s theory of identification: identification with a social master or leader (ideal ego) and identification with an ideal. The latter form of identification is what opens up the possibility of community, as it remains empty. This point opens a deeper philosophical question of the formation of the self.  It is similar to Rousseau’s statement that “I never meditate, I never dream better than when I forget myself.” Psychoanalysis shows us that the individual is most him or herself in the wondrous emptiness of being, rather than the personal Ego, the Other or the totality (157). Just as the munus is formed around the shared loss of the social itself, entering community requires the cultivation of a form of nonidentification in order to maintain peaceful relations across communities and within communities. Nonidentificaiton is a form of identification that subjects exchange in the process of self-loss or in the process of the negative moment of questioning their social identity. Nonidentification is a name for a type of identification with emptiness, a form of identification that opens a space for civility. Nonidentification opens the space for public speech to take place in a civil fashion, but this nonidentification does not completely erase the prior identity, but it does suspend it. Nonidentificaiton is a form of identification that brings about the munus, signaling the presence and actuality of social institution as such, in opposition to its absence, to pre-social chaos. Thus, a sign of nonidentification is when a fused group forms an identification around something that transcends the particularities of their identity interests or concerns: the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir Square protecting one another in prayer, or the alternative public sphere opened by different identity groups in an occupation of public space. But nonidentification is not enough to sustain a fused group. Bernard Stiegler, a contemporary French philosopher, develops an argument in a series of books called Symbolic Misery that today, the “we” suffers insofar as it fails to form an interior “we” within the self. Forming a self-love is a necessary movement prior to the self-forming community with others. This interior movement of self-love has become stunted in our time, Stiegler claims, due to a wider shift in man’s relation to technological objects. Stiegler argues that a condition of “symbolic misery” derives from an inability to form aesthetic attachments to singular objects; the sights, sounds and symbols that we consume are dominated by marketing mechanisms. Once the self loses its singularity it can no longer love itself.  This condition of symbolic misery has given rise to a segment of our population that experiences this misery with particular acuity. These “New Barbarians” as Stiegler calls them are those affected by this form of misery as well as various forms of economic deprivation, the decline in real wages, the precarity of neoliberal life lead to unstable emotional states. The conflict that this misery causes in places like America, France and Britain is that it intensifies “resentment politics.” This is a form of politics that is desperately searching for a cause to this misery and is eager to find the object of this cause in the immigrant, the Muslim, or the social Other, however defined. This resentment politics causes a pervasive stasis of our social relations, animating our social relations with tension and conflict. How does one begin to form a dialogue with these segments of the population that have closed down their own capacity for self-love? This is the work of love. Whither Asymmetrical Love? We face a future civil and political situation of ‘all against all’, a diagnosis that Hobbes sought to manage in the Leviathan by pushing community to the periphery of the state, by making community an outlaw formation within the state. What is needed in such a situation is a reevaluation of the role of love. What is love in a civic and political sense? I will define love as opening oneself up to an unequal relationship, which is to say that love is not about a subject-to-subject equality. There is always a subject and an object in love – all love is therefore a relationship based in a form of difference. In Hegel’s conception of the state of nature or ‘war of all against all’ he develops have the myth of the master slave dialectic. In Hegel’s myth, what occurs is a battle to the death and it is the dear of death that hovers over and determines the relation between the master and the slave. Love is a tool that is used by the slave who has been converted into an object by the master in order to transform the hostile relation into something more benevolent and good. Love is thus the third point outside of the subject and object relation that serves as an alternative to death. The important point to note here is that love acknowledges the asymmetry and injustice at the heart of the social and works towards something more positive in spite of it. Lacan invented a myth of love in his seminar on Plato’s Symposium and I want to describe this myth as it gives us a better idea of the asymmetry involved in love. In this myth, Lacan seeks to distinguish love from desire. He says, imagine a hand reaching out to clutch a beautiful rose. The intended outcome of doing this is to attain the object of desire, to clutch this beautiful rose. But imagine that instead of the clutch of the rose taking place, what actually takes place is that the rose reaches back to the hand that reached for it and embraces the hand. It is this alternative embrace that produces love. The lesson is clear: love is not achieved when the hand that reaches for the beautiful rose meets the rose itself, for this would be desire. Love occurs when the hand that reaches for the beautiful rose experiences a second hand –from the rose itself – that reaches back to it and grasps it. In this myth, love does not elevate the desire that you were looking to satisfy as an end in itself, love turns on the one who was desiring the object of beauty and receives an embrace from that object in return. The point I want to draw from this myth is twofold: one, love is different than desire in that desire finds its object and then moves on to the next object. With love, there is a mutuality that takes place, but not equality. Love is always asymmetrical. How does this relate to civic and political love? There is a rich tradition in the black radical tradition from James Baldwin to Martin Luther King Jr. of bold and courageous forms of asymmetrical love. James Baldwin wrote, “the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.” (92) Love only comes about when the self’s commitment to the other exceeds the other’s commitment to their own self. Asymmetrical love therefore, like the gift of community, holds no expectation for reciprocation. Asymmetrical love is thus unconditional despite the fact that the one for whom you are loving has turned you into an object of transgression—this is why for Baldwin, love is a battle and a war. The Christian church held a view of love that was mimetic; to love those that reciprocate, but as Grant Fareed has noted, Baldwin saw this mimetic or imitative form of love to be inadequate. Asymmetrical love imposed a duty that was absolute, pitched beyond the confines of what the institution of the church would prescribe—Baldwin would exert this love regardless of whether white people reciprocated or not. This is the gift of asymmetrical love and why I consider it at the very heart of communitas because it is premised on the impossible exchange of the gift to the other at heart of coming into community. We need to develop strategies that open the potential for civic and political love in today’s world. Asymmetrical love is in decline today. We need to encourage forms of what I name “unplugging” or the love that comes in the wake of cutting the knot of identity conflict and identity power. Love is needed in the wake of unplugging because the former stability that the identity provided is now in free-fall. Unplugging holds aims to open the other an acknowledgement of the need to engage the Other qua stranger. Unplugging opens a space for love where it formerly had no existence. Because love is fundamentally asymmetrical, there must be some shock, event, surprise or touch with the Other that opens up this asymmetry, and encourages a new the desire for love. Unplugging opens new possibilities of being-together, of responsiveness to the Other, and it brings the subject towards non-identification, and away from a form of identity power. Examples of unplugging happen when the Evangelical sees in the Muslim an avenue to his or her own ethical tradition of love for the neighbor from Christ’s teaching on the Sermon on the Mount. Unplugging might come about when the immigrant is seen as a source for a re-thinking of one’s own conception of hospitality. Unplugging is often an accidental event that shakes up the status quo relations and charts a different path. One of the biggest challenges to unplugging today revolves around the exhaustion that identity groups have in sacrificing their claims on power for the sake of the Other’s emancipation. What are we prepared to advocate for the Other in a society in which we are trained to see our identity as radically individual? Towards this end, we can note one of the challenges the Black Lives Matter movement faces is the very way in which whiteness is a type of identity that holds the power to opt out of having their identity politicized. The work that is thus necessary for supporters of Black Lives Matter is to drive white people in America to a new way of relating to their own ability to not be politicized qua their identity in the same way that black people and other people of color in America are. Perhaps the asymmetry that Baldwin and King promoted cannot come about until we have different forms of unplugging—i.e. we have to begin by cutting the Gordian knots on the fantasy of identity power and the alienating solipsism it breeds. Lacan put it nicely when he stated, “psychoanalysis alone recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever.”(81) Works Cited: Fareed, Grant Love is Asymmetrical Love: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time Critical Philosophy of Race Vol. 3, No. 2, 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Moncayo, Raul The Emptiness of Oedipus Karnac Books, 2012, 157 Freud, Sigmund (2013) Group Psychology Lexington, KY, 116. Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, Stanford University Press, 1988, 155 – 156 Freud, Sigmund Group Psychology The Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report, January 2018 http://cms.edelman.com/sites/default/files/2018-01/2018_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report_Jan.PDF Butler, Judith Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press 1997 Fisher, Mark Capitalist Realism New York, NY, Verso Books 2009 Sartre, Jean-Paul In Search of a Method Kant, Immanuel (2007) Critique of Judgment, Oxford University Press, Pippin, Robert (2008) Hegel’s Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press Esposito, Roberto (2011) Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1